Check out Cynthia’s show review of Spike and the Gimme Gimmes HERE!
What’s it like being in a band for 30 years, AKA more than half of your life?
Spike: Yeah, when you put it that way, I don’t know. It’s like shedding skin. It’s like being alive for 55 years, and you’re not the same person. You’re literally, physically, and chemically not the same person because you shed. You shed people, relationships, and some of the nice, familiar things are still the same. It’s always nice to go back to cities that you know, and you get to know them a little bit better. One of the nicest things about being in a band for 30 years is knowing where to go whenever you hit whatever far-off locality.
Do you have a favorite venue or city?
Spike: That’s tough. I do love the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. I grew up in Pittsburgh, going to see shows at a place called The Electric Banana that doesn’t exist anymore. This band never played there.
Audra, their manager/stylist/guru, chimes in: The Van Buren in Phoenix, that’s a cool venue. The Forum in London is pretty great.
Spike: Yes, very nice. It’s hard to pick a favorite.
Audra: The best venue is Drake’s Place in Toronto, The History. Best sound system, best backstage.
Spike: The one that you always play in, Club Soda in Montreal. I like that club.
Are there any bands that you saw live that you hadn’t heard before and you fell in love with?
Spike: That’s a good question. Some bands don’t capture the energy live that they have on recordings, and then vice versa, some bands don’t capture their live energy into a recording. I guess it’s kinda like putting lightning in a bottle. Audra used to put on a show called Stinky’s Peep Show, and I would have seen a lot of bands there for the first time. But yeah, I’ll be damed if I can think of anyone in particular. There’s just been so many.
Audra: What about The Mummies? Trash Women.
Spike: Yeah, the Trash Women. Untamed Youth. I saw Untamed Youth at The Purple Onion, and that was the first time I’d ever seen them. Guitar Wolf was another one.
What can we all do as individuals to make the world a better place?
Spike: One of the big ones is not insisting that life burn people because it burned you. Especially with newer generations. Like that student loan thing. The main argument against student loan forgiveness was that it burned me, so it’s got to burn you. Bad things happen to me, so they gotta happen to you, whether they make any sense or actually make the world a better place or not. No, I got burned. I’m going to insist on your getting burned as well. I think if people could stop…because that’s a human impulse. That’s not even political. That’s like a weird sort of impulse that we have as humans, but I think if we could shed ourselves of that and the notion of moral hazard as we Anglo-Americans understand it. As in it’s more of a moral hazard to give somebody something for nothing than it is to have people hungry or homeless. Like that’s the actual moral hazard, but the way we understand it, the actual term means giving somebody something for nothing, which I think we have to get used to doing. Because the places where they actually house homeless people are a success. Like in decent, dignified…where they don’t feel the weird sort of urge to punish them for being homeless. You can’t make it too nice. Like, even if that extra window doesn’t cost anything, don’t put that in because then that would be a moral hazard, because then they’d have a view. I don’t have a view. I’m kind of a pinko, but you don’t want to hear about that. And it’s worse in my old age. I’ve gone further to the left of whatever the mythical center is in my old age.
What made you want to channel your inner Mariah?
Spike: Passive income. What does she do, just defrost every year? It’s already a Christmas classic at this point.
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*Note: This was a video-recorded interview, and, unfortunately, something happened with the audio of the video, as well as some of the audio that was recorded using a backup recording method. This is what could be pieced together from my memory and the audio that was captured, but this was not intended to be the full interview. Shit happens.
PHOTO CREDIT: Screen grabs provided by Cynthia Novellano for ZRockR Magazine – (c) 2025 – All Rights Reserved.